OUSMANE SEMBENE: THE LIFE OF A REVOLUTIONARY ARTISTby Samba Gadjigo, Mount Holyoke College

(an introductory outline of the forthcoming authorized biography of
Ousmane Sembene of the same title)

"Of all African film directors, Sembene is the first to confer value
to images."--Med Hondo

Crossing the geographical and national borders of his native Senegal,
Ousmane Sembene's literary and cinematographic output places him today
as the "father" of African films and as one of the most prolific
"French-speaking" African writers in this first century of "creative"
writing in francophone Africa. From the publication of his first poem
in Marseilles in 1956, at age thirty three, to Guelwaar (1996),
his lastest published novel, Sembene has produced five novels, five collections
of short stories, and directed numerous films, four shorts, nine features,
and four documentaries He has granted hundreds of interviews to teachers,
researchers, students, and to dozens of film and literary critics from
around the world. Scholarly articles on his work have appeared in scores
of international journals. Particularly here, in the US, publications
and invitations to university and college campuses almost equal those
of Wole Soyinka, and Chinua Achebe. Of Sembene's ten published literary
works, seven have been translated into English, and all of his films are
subtitled in English, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese. In American
universities, the attraction to Sembene's work crosses disciplinary boundaries.
His literary work has entered the curricula of many high schools and universities
throughout Africa. Tens of Mémoires de maîtrise (
MA dissertations) and doctoral theses have been devoted to Sembene's literary
and film work.

Undoubtedly, in Africa, more ostensibly in Burkina Faso (the African capital
of motion pictures), Ousmane Sembene's name has also captured the "popular"
imagination. Some five years ago, while attending a festival in Ouagadougou,
I discovered a restaurant menu labeled "Ousmane Sembene", and
I smiled at a green and black-painted taxi cab self baptized Le docker
noir (1956), the original title of Sembene's first published novel
(published in English as The Black Docker in, 1987). In the US,
in 1996, his literary and film work also inspired Florence Ladd, then
director of Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
with her novel Sarah's Psalm, recognized by Boston Magazine as
" a story (that) has the making of a modern myth. (Emphasis mine).
Set in the 1960's in Cambridge and in Dakar Senegal ( that space sometimes
expanding to Europe, and the French Riviera), Sarah's Psalm tells
the story of Sarah Stewart, a young black Harvard graduate during the
bourgeoning of the Civil Rights Movement and the first re-discovery of
Africa by many African American intellectuals and cultural elites. Although
Ms. Ladd warned that all characters in her novel were fictional, for her
main character, the yearning to go to Africa, was a journey of self discovery,
and arose from reading and viewing the work of a character named Ibrahim
Mangane, a Sembene prototype.

Not only has Sembene's work provided the African American Diaspora with
an "alternative" knowledge of Africa, he is also among the most
sought after African artists in the Caribbean. The University of the West
Indies, at Cave Hill, Barbados was honored by his presence in the fall
of 2000. I helped arrange for that event in the course of my one-year
tenure at UWI, in 1999-2000. During my last visit to Guadeloupe in the
Spring of 2000, I was happy to hear from the owner- managers of Librairie
Jasor, the main literary outlet in the French West Indies, that they want
to host Ousmane Sembene and to screen his work. During a literary conference
organized by the University of Guyana, in Georgetown in the Spring of
2000, when I showed Black Girl (the film that first introduced
Sembene to an international audience of writers and artists attending
the 1966 Festival Mondiale des arts Nègres held in Dakar), the
overflow audience asked for and was granted a second showing, for the
same night. In many countries in Africa, high schools, libraries, and
amphitheaters bear his name. Even in Paris, where his work is far from
meeting official approval, in 1998, a whole week was devoted to a retrospective
of Sembene's work, masterminded and organized by Mauritanian film maker
Med Hondo who once told me that "Sembene is the first African director
to confer value to African images." In 1996, a week-long screening
of Sembene's work at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia,
brought together fervent crowds of students, film critics, and other cultural
workers. Sembene is also arguably the most interviewed Senegalese and
African film director on the globe.

Born in 1923 in Casamance, southern Senegal, where his "crazy"
fisherman father had migrated from Dakar around 1900, Ousmane Sembene
has, from a marginalized and a very modest beginning, inscribed his name
in world history. Expelled from school in 1936 for indiscipline, his formal
education would never go beyond middle school. Also unable to take on
his father's trade because he was always seasick, in 1938 he was sent
to his father's relatives in Dakar, headquarters of the territories of
French West Africa. From 1938 to 1944 he worked as an apprentice mechanic
and a bricklayer. Although he was denied an opportunity of a formal education,
Sembene developed a love of reading - mostly comics - and discovered cinema
in the segregated movie houses of Dakar. He spent his days at work as
a manual laborer and his after work hours either reading, watching movies
or, along with his neighborhood mates, attending evenings of story telling,
wrestling, and other "traditional" Senegalese cultural events
. As a French citizen, in 1944, like many young Africans of his generation,
he was called to active duty to liberate France from German occupation
and subsequently was dispatched to the colony of Niger as a chauffeur
in the 6th colonial infantry unit. Upon being discharged in 1946 at the
end of the war, he went back to Dakar in the midst of charged social and
political activism. That same year, for the first time, he took membership
in the construction worker's trade union and witnessed the first general
workers' strike that paralyzed the colonial economy for a month and ushered
in the nationalist struggle in French Africa.

In 1947, unemployed in the thick of a war-ravaged colonial economy, Sembene
left Dakar in search of a better living and also for the opportunity to
feed his unquenchable thirst for learning- "apprendre à l'école
de la vie."(to learn in the school of life), as he put it many times.
He migrated to France and lived in the Mediterranean city of Marseilles
until 1960, the year Senegal was granted its political independence. As
an black African docker who "knows" how to read and write, in
Cold War Marseilles, he was soon identified by labor union leader Victor
Gagnère ("papa Gagnere", as Sembene affectionately referred
to him) and enrolled in the CGT ( Confederation generale des travailleurs
), the largest and most powerful left wing workers' union in post-war
France. After back-breaking work unloading ships during the day (containers
did not exist then), at night and on weekends Sembene enthusiastically
attended seminars and workshops on Marxism, joined the French Communist
Party in 1950, and the MOURAP (Movement against racism, anti Semitism
and peace) in 1951, a political organization born of the resistence movement
during WWII. The same year, while unloading a ship, Ousmane Sembene broke
his backbone. After a long recovery and now unable to sustain the physical
effort required by the work of a docker, with the support of his comrades,
he was assigned a post as (aiguilleur), a switchman. A new opportunity
was opened to Sembene to rise from a laborer who could read and hardly
write, into a well-rounded intellectual, an exceptionally cultured humanist.
As his comrade and friend Bernard Worms put it: "He rose to the status
of the intellectual aristocracy of the labor movement; he become "un
honnête homme." He spent most of his free time roaming public
libraries, museums, theater halls, and tirelessly attending seminars on
Marxism and Communism. He read everything: literature on Marxist ideology,
political economy, political science, works of fiction, and history. During
those Marseilles years with the passion and obsession of a convert to
a new religion, Sembene also participated in the protest movements organized
by the French Communist Party against the colonial war in Indochina (1953)
and the Korean war(1950-1953). He also openly supported (and later wrote
about) the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in its struggle for
independence from France (1954-1962), and he vehemently protested against
the Rosenberg trial and execution in the United States in 1953. Dreaming
of the universal freedom and brotherhood mirrored by communist ideology,
Ousmane Sembene also worked to educate and liberate the community of mostly
illiterate and "apolitical" African workers shipwrecked at the
margins of French society.

It was also in the midst of such an intense political activism that Sembene
discovered other communist artists and writers: Richard Wright, John Roderigo
(Dos Pasos), Ricardo Neftali Reyes (aka Pablo Néruda), Ernest Hemingway,
Nazim Hikmet (Turkey), the works of French Communist writer and resistance
organizer Paul Eluart, and, Jean Bruller (Vercors) co-founder of Les Editions
de minuit (devoted to the publication of works dealing with resistance),
and author of the classic work about the German Occupation and the Resistance,
Le silence de la mer (1942) (Silence of the Sea). He also came into contact
with the works of the Jamaican Communist writer Claude McKay (whose 1929
novel Banjo would influence his first novel) and the novels of Jacques
Roumain, another Communist writer from Haiti and author of the classic
Masters of the Dew (1947). Master's of the Dew 's communist vision provided
most of the powerful images in Sembene's O pays, mon beau peuple (1957).
In Marseilles he also became involved with the international Communist
youth organization Les Auberges de jeunesses (Youth Hostels) and discovered
the Communist theater, Le Theâtre Rouge.

However, as Sembene struggled with millions of others for revolutionary
change at the international level, he also felt alienated by the quasi
absence of "revolutionary" artists and writers from Africa,
the voices of the masses of workers, women, and all those exploited and
silenced by the combined external forces of colonialism and the internal
yoke of African "tradition". Through activism, Sembene proved
that he was deeply aware of the urgent need for political and social change
in Africa, but unlike many of his generation ( Sékou Touré
in Guinée, Patrice Lumumba in Belgian Congo, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana,
and Amilcar Cabral in Bissau Guinea who chose the political arena) he,
like Palestinian writer Edward Said, strongly believed and still believes
that the struggle against colonialism is not solely a fight over who should
own the land but it also a contest over who should have the right to represent
whom. In the historical context and contest against colonization, for
Sembene , the terrain of art and cultural representation are a sine qua
none for the freedom and revival of African societies. "L'Afrique
d'hier me fascine, L'Afrique de demain m'exalte" ("The Africa
of the past fascinates me; the future Africa excites me") says Sembene.
The need to invest in Africa, to contribute to a better self-awareness
of the past, present, and future Africa became a passion for him. Africa
became what Albert Camus called "Une valeur", that which transcends
one's own life; that for which one is ready to give his/her life, like
South Africa's Nelson Mandela who once stated: "Democracy is a value
I live for, and if need be, for which I am prepared to die."

Thus, since 1956, while still a dock worker, and upon his return to an
independent Senegal in 1960 until today, Sembene's daily life has been
devoted to the production and dissemination of emancipating and restorative
images for those Frantz Fanon named the "the Wretched of the Earth",
those Africans disenfranchised and marginalized in their own society,
but also whose unsung struggles are a Daily Heroism (The title
of Sembene's latest trilogy of films.) Yet for Sembene, in both literature
and film, the work of "art" should not be a mere re-presentation
of "reality" "une pancarte" (a political banner),
as Sembene terms it. It is a work of art, a symbolic form of representation.
In order to capture the imagination of the people they "speak"
to and for , those symbols first must be intelligible to them. They must
stem from and reflect their cultural universe. What is at work in Sembene's
literary and film creation is an endeavor to capture and project a genuine
African film language and aesthetics, that would also entertain a "dialogical"
relationship with other world cultures.

Sembene the Writer

Nowadays, in the United States and around the world, Sembene is best
known as a filmmaker. However, it should be clear that even Sembene's
use of cinema is nothing but a compromise gesture to bring home what the
widespread illiteracy in the continent would not allow him to accomplish
in his literary work. It is through literature (or rather, it is because
he failed to communicate with African "masses" through literature)
that Sembene came to film making, as a last resort. Indeed, most of his
film works (except Xala, 1973, and Guelwaar, 1993) are adaptations
of earlier novels or short stories. Xala and Guelwaar are rather a re-writing
of the original film script's political, social, and cultural affirmation.

Ousmane Sembene started his artistic career as a poet, a short story writer,
an essayist and a novelist. His first published work was Liberté
(1956), a long poem in which after an extended panegyric on the a vast
inventory of human accomplishment in the area of art, the poet also launched
into a heartbreaking lament over his estrangement from universal beauty.
The long poem closes on a dream of a free Africa whose children will redirect
rivers and build monuments to its beauty. This "programmatic"
poem published in Cahiers du sud, a Marseilles-based left-wing
review then directed by André Gaillard, also contains the contour
of Sembene's future work.. His novels and short stories since 1956 are:
Le docker noir (1956) (The Black Docker), his loosely reconstructed
experiences as an black African dockworker in Marseilles; O pays, mon
beau peuple (1957) is almost, thematically, a sequel to the 1956 novel.
Here the former soldier, after experiencing the war and sojourning through
Europe, returns to his native Casamance and in a manner reminiscent of
Romanian Communism, spearheaded an agrarian reform (following the model
of the Kokhoze, in Soviet Union, but here directed and controlled by farmers
themselves) in order to promote economic, political, and social change
for the farmers. Les bouts de bois de dieu (1960) (God's Bits
of Wood) is a masterpiece of fictionalized history, conceived from
Marxist ideology and yet Sembene's first genuinely "African"
story. It was a move away from the canons of the European bourgeois novel
of the nineteenth century. This third novel, a fictional recreation of
the second and most comprehensive French West African railroad workers
strike against their colonial bosses in 1947 was followed in 1962 by Voltaïque
(Tribal Scares), a collection of short stories. In 1963, he released
L'harmattan ( a political epic of the later years of the 50's,
in the final struggle against colonial occupation). Le mandat suivi
de blanche genèse (1966) (The Money Order with White Genesis),
was, to be sure, a first presentation of the post-colonial situation in
Senegal. Afterwards came Xala (1973), a sarcastic satire of the new and
"impotent" Senegalese bourgeoisie, and Le dernier de l'empire
(1981) (The Last of the Empire) which laid bare the internal contradictions
and subsequent demise of an impotent and narcissistic political leadership.
In 1992, a collection of two stories Niiwam et Taaw explored the
despair of the Senegalese peasantry and urban youth. Guelwaar (1996),
Sembene's latest novel, an adaption of a 1993 feature film (reversing
the relationship between literature and film), warned against the dangers
of religious fundamentalism while showing the ironies and humiliations
if a nation relies on international aid for its own economic survival
.

In Sembene's own life, reading and writing took center stage. There has
been a long love affair (literally, and figuratively) between Sembene
and literature. He once fell in love and married a literary scholar who
specialized in his work. Sembene's rich literary imagination fed on a
vast knowledge of world literature and its masterpieces. The success of
his literary work around the world flows from his own phenomenal love
of reading. In addition to Sembene's ten published volumes, there are
also dozens of manuscripts, some waiting for that spark that will bring
them to the public's attention and thus to life. Sembene also has this
infuriating and deliberate habit of burning many of his papers.

Sembene the Film Director

Yet, since 1962, upon returning to Senegal and having visited many other
countries in the region, Sembene had to face the endemic level of illiteracy
among his intended audience and the paralyzing effect it was having on
the dissemination of his work. Already in 1938, when movie going had started
to become his passion, Ousmane Sembene realized the magical power of cinema
in conveying messages. Ironically, the spark came from the viewing of
Leni Riefenstahl's Olympiad, a documentary on the 1936 Munich Olympic
games by one of Hitler's favorite filmmakers.

Touring the continent in 1961, at the moment he was sailing along the
Congo River, and in the middle of the short-lived vitality of the Patrice
Lumumba era, Sembene is said to have had a vision: landscapes, people,
movements and sounds to which no written document could do justice. Then
it dawned on him the necessity and desire to make movies - the technology
and art of motion, color, and sound. He was not thinking of movies for
escapism and dream making in the Hollywood model and paradigm, but movies
as "école du soir" (night school). His efforts became
aimed at educating the people, in the language of the people, following
in the millennia-long tradition of many African oral cultures where, at
night, people gathered around a wood fire and listened to stories told
by either the griot (a professional storyteller) or by the elders. Although
to this day Sembene has a strong personal preference for literature, he
also sees motion picture combined with synchronized sound as a necessity,
the only medium that could reconcile the African artist with the millions
of peasants, workers, and women, whom Aimé Césaire called
"les bouches qui n'ont pas bouches" (those mouths without a
mouth).

Sembene was nearly 40 when he decided to seek scholarships and go back
to Europe and learn the technique of film making. In the context of the
Cold War, the Soviet Union (hoping to extend its influence over Africa)
was eager to oblige. Thus, in 1962, Sembene spent a year learning cinematography
at the Gorki Studios in Moscow, under the tutelage of Soviet director
Marc Donskoï. At the end of 1962, he returned to Senegal with his
knowledge and an old Soviet camera. In 1963, with Borom Saret ,
his first short, Sembene ushered Senegal and Africa into the landscape
of world cinema, albeit 68 years after the invention of cinematography,
and 63 years after the first Lumiere brother's L'arroseur arrosé
was screened in Senegal. His film work would transform Africa from a mere
consumer of images made elsewhere to that of a "producer" of
its own images. As Borom Saret shows, Sembene was urgently concerned with
pointing his camera on the present day, post colonial Senegalese society
whose spatial mapping reflects the internal conflicts between the old
and the new, between the powerful and the powerless, the changing of the
old markers of identity. In 1964, Niaye (an adaptation of the short
story White Genesis) a story of incest in a village noble family documented
the withering of old moral values. These first two shorts were followed
by La noire de... (Black Girl) in 1966, a first and prize-winning
feature that put Africa on the map of world cinema. However, it was with
Mandabi (The Money Order) in 1968, that Sembene's dream
to reconnect with Africa's masses came through. For the first time, indeed,
an African filmmaker was experimenting by using an African language (Wolof,
the dominant language in Senegal), hence setting a new trend which would
be followed by all film makers on the continent. In 1969 he released two
shorts: Taumatisme de la femme face à la polygamie (Women
and the Trauma of Polygamy), and Les dérives du chômage
(The Afflictions of Unemployment). Two years later, in 1971 Sembene
would adapt the short story Tauw and direct Emitaï,
his first historical film, a dramatization of the forced conscription
of Senegalese soldiers during WWII, followed by Basket Africain aux
jeux olympiques de Munich, RFA (African Basketball in the Munich
Olympic Games) in 1972, and L'Afrique aux Olympiades (Africa
at the Olympic Games) in 1973. In 1974, Xala, an adaptation
of his earlier 1973 novella would be released, followed by a controversial
and internationally acclaimed historical film Ceddo, a re-writing
of the history of Islam in Senegal. Camp de Thiaroye (1988) a sequel
to Emitaï, centers around the massacre by French authorities
of returning African soldiers from WWII.The award winning Guelwaar,
une légende du 21 ème siècle (Guelwaar, a
Legend of the 21st Century) would be released in 1993. Sembene would
close the century with two films devoted to the struggle of African women:
Héroisme au quotidien (Daily Heroism) in 1999, and
Faat Kine in 2000 and
open the new century with Moolaade in 2003 a crusade against a century-old
practice of female circumcision which still plagues more than twenty-five
out of the fifty -four African states recognized by the United Nations.

Importance of Sembene's Film Work

As can be seen from this brief presentation, Ousmane Sembene's forty year
film work bears an unparalleled social and artistic significance in the
context of both world and African cinema. At the international level,
Sembene has been unequivocally recognized as the father of African cinema
and his has received countless awards and distinctions. His images are
intended not only for entertainment and profit (Sembene adheres to Lenin's
prescription that "An artist must make money in order to live and
work, but not live and work in order to make money"), but rather
as an educational tool. His work is aimed at promoting freedom, social
justice, and at restoring pride and dignity to African people. To reach
such a goal, Sembene seeks first to "indigenize" the medium
by resorting first to the use of African languages (Wolof and Diola, two
Senegalese languages, and Bambara, a language spoken in Eastern Senegal,
in Mauritania, Mali, Burkina, and Côte d'Ivoire in Moolaade) Secondly,
this primary emphasis on language allowed him to specify his public :
"Africa is my "audience" while the West and the "rest"
are only targeted as "markets". Thirdly, he borrows from the
rich heritage of African oral narratives, handed down by the griots and
rejecting a mere imitation of Hollywood's narrative techniques, Sembene's
cinema ushered in a genuinely African film aesthetics. "We will never
be Arabs or Europeans; we are African", Sembene likes to philosophize.
Finally, bent on educating and on liberating the disenfranchised, Sembene's
cinema uses the tools provided by Marxist analysis and the passion of
a visionary who profoundly believes, like Antoine de Saint-Exupery's character,
Riviere, (Vol de nuit ; Night Flight) that only creation
gives meaning to life. Counter to the hegemonic"official" history
of Senegal, produced by its local elite, Sembene's filmography, which
critics have perceived as "A call to action" has given voice
to the millions of marginalized and voiceless African peasantry, its workers,
women, and children, while often putting him at odds with his country's
powerful. Indeed, most of Sembene's films have been either banned or censored
by former president Leopold Senghor's regime.

Moreover, since Camp De Thiaroye (1988), through Guelwaar
(1993), Faat Kine (2000),
and Moolaade (2003), Sembene's film work has taken on and fulfilled
a manifold objective that, symbolically, goes well beyond the strict realm
of art as symbolic representation. Indeed since 1957, with the independence
of Nkrumah's Ghana, and the creation of The Organization of African Unity
(OAU) in Addis Ababa in 1963 by thirty newly independent states (and the
fifty-three nations making up the current African Union), Africa's political
leaders have failed to reach the triple objective of putting an end to
its "balkanization" by political unity, of performing its economic
integration, nor of ending its technological dependence on the West.

Indeed, for the financing of Camp De Thiaroye, Sembene, without
giving up on the vertical model of cooperation with Europe (North-South
axis), took the fresh approach of a hitherto uncharted model of a horizontal,
inter-African (South-South axis) cooperation. For the financing of the
film Sembene performed a symbolic "economic integration" through
a co-production budget between SNPC (Senegal), ENAPROC (Algeria), SATPEC
(Tunisia), and his own production company (Filmi Domireew/Filmi Kajoor).
For the first time, Sembene also called on the services of a Tunisian
lab for post-production of his film. Moreover, a film about a colonial
massacre (the killing by French officers of African soldiers who returned
from WWII, Camp Thiaroye ) also offers a unified approach to African history
by also echoing the 1954 Setif colonial massacre that heralded the war
of independence in Algeria. Although Guelwaar (1993) is a co-production
with Galatee-Films, a French production company, its post-production was
also done in Morocco. As for Faat
Kine, the production was the result of a truly international cooperation
(France, Germany, Switzerland, USA, Cameroon, and Senegal) and the post-production
was again done in Morocco. With Moolaade, for the first time, Sembene
has made a film outside Senegal's national borders, in Burkina Faso, seventeen
kms, east of the border with Côte d'Ivoire, and in Bambara (a language
spoken in eastern Senegal, in Mali, southern Mauritania, and, of course
Burkina Faso). The technical crew was French (camera, sound, lighting),
the set designer was from Benin, the production managers were from Burkina
Faso and some machinists were from Senegal. The cast was selected by Casting
Sud in Burkina Faso and includes Malians and Burkinabe as well as actors
from Côte d'Ivoire. Thus, in his project as an artist-film maker,
Ousmane Sembene realized the dream of a unified Africa, which its political
leaders still have yet to produce.